


Aboard the Dauntless

by honorat



Category: Pirates of the Caribbean (Movies)
Genre: Deleted Scenes, Gen, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-17
Updated: 2019-03-26
Packaged: 2019-11-21 16:27:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 18,965
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18144617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/honorat/pseuds/honorat
Summary: Another story transferred from livejournal.Sequel to "Marooned," just a short transitional chapter. Commodore Norrington rescues his lady love in a highly compromising situation. Raving sailing ensues. More movie novelization including deleted scenes and filler—the second trip to Isla de Muerta. As usual, this story has gotten entirely out of hand.





	1. Beholden to a Pirate

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: The script is Ted and Terry’s just like they promised; the wealth is Mickey Mouse’s just like he promised; and I’m all set to make no money at all, just like I promised. So we’re all men of our word really—except for me who is actually a woman—well, and Mickey, who is actually a rodent.
> 
> Thanks and one small Caribbean Island in a nearby universe go to geekmama for beta work on this. Any errors and inconsistencies remain mine.

Commodore James Norrington’s heart had sunk after his initial joy at seeing Elizabeth Swann alive on the shore of the small desert island. He had known all along that she had been held captive amongst pirates for over a week. When no ransom demand had been forthcoming, they had feared the worst. But he hadn’t let himself realize the full implications of that truth until he saw her with Jack Sparrow. How she had ended up in such a location with the man who had escaped with young Turner was a mystery. But remembering the pirate’s behaviour towards Elizabeth on the docks at Port Royal, he could not imagine that, if by some chance she had escaped the Black Pearl unscathed, that black-hearted bastard Sparrow, had left her unharmed. He could see the pirate smirking at him on the beach, probably quite aware of the commodore’s thoughts.  
  
Vowing that he would choke the life out of Sparrow with his bare hands, Norrington gave orders for the longboat to be brought in to shore.  
  
Elizabeth met them in the shallows. At first glance, she looked as though she had been through hell, and his stomach twisted. She was filthy, dressed only in a thin and extremely grubby shift. Her face was bruised and sunburnt and sooty. Her feet were cut up, and one hand had been bandaged. What his men were thinking was written plainly on their faces.  
  
But the commodore had come to the aid of enough port towns in the aftermath of pirate attacks to recognize the look in a woman’s eyes when she has been raped and abused. Elizabeth did not have that look. In fact her eyes reminded him of nothing so much as those of a young marine in his first battle—bright and fierce and determined. As though her wounds were merely battle scars, and her heart was whole. She would not have met him with such glad, innocent eyes had Sparrow, or the other pirates for that matter, hurt her much at all.  
  
Nor, he reflected, would she have been so comfortable around the pirate when he returned to the water’s edge wearing his boots, shrugging into his waistcoat and re-tying his sash. Elizabeth laughed and teased him about how his legend would suffer if he did not immediately find a bath and a laundress. Sparrow looked mutinous with respect to the bath but agreed that the laundress, if she were a winsome lass, would be a fine idea. Rather than appearing shocked at this bold immorality, Miss Swann slapped at Jack Sparrow good naturedly and told him to mind his manners, the quality had arrived.  
  
The entire exchange disturbed Norrington more than he cared to say. It occurred to him to wonder what look he would expect in Elizabeth’s eyes had she been willing and the pirate not needed to force her. He repressed that traitorous thought immediately. But his mood was not improved by the fact that it was Sparrow to whom Elizabeth turned for help in boarding the boat in her long skirt.  
  
The pirate handed Elizabeth gracefully into the boat, with an admiring glance at her display of trim ankles, irritating the commodore further. Norrington himself was having a hard time keeping his professional detachment in the presence of his scantily clad love, but that bloody bastard had no right to look at her so. Sparrow grinned mockingly at the commodore as he clambered in after the girl. It gave Norrington great satisfaction to see that grin slip as his marines again confiscated the man’s pistol and baldric.  
  
The satisfaction was short lived. As the boat set off for the Dauntless, Norrington heard Mulroy asking Jack Sparrow to tell them another story. “And no lies now,” Murtogg added. He really had to get that pirate back to Fort Charles and safely hanged before the man had charmed the entire Caribbean into legalizing piracy.  
  
Thus, the rescue boat returned to the ship with Sparrow’s voice occasionally reaching Norrington’s ears. “And then we let all twenty-five chickens loose on the deck . . .” The commodore winced. The man was not a pirate, he was a bloody joke.  
  
His eyes were drawn again and again to Elizabeth’s eager laughing face. It went very much against his grain to have to feel gratitude to Jack Sparrow.  
  
TBC


	2. The Best Laid Plans

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Elizabeth is back in the arms of her father, where she discovers she doesn’t want to be. Jack is back in the hands of the law, where he always knew he didn’t want to be. Plans go awry. Temptation occurs. Sacrifices are made. Norrington makes a vile joke. Elizabeth’s and Jack’s points of view. Don’t worry. Governor Swann and Commodore Norrington will get their chance next

The arrival of Jack and Elizabeth on the deck of the Dauntless coincided with a flurry of activity designed to prepare the great vessel to make way. Midshipmen rushed to stow and store the longboat, sailors turned the bars of the capstan to draw up the anchor, and the rigging swarmed with crewmen intent on unfurling and sheeting home the vast sails. She would be carrying all her canvas away from this island. Men hauled halyards and braced yards preparatory to bringing the ship about onto her new course. Crisp commands snapped through the air like the voice of God calling order out of chaos.  
  
Elizabeth was herded away from her disreputable fellow castaway by an enormously relieved Governor Swann. The man had nearly crushed his daughter with embraces, murmuring broken endearments into her hair.

As well he might, Jack conceded, considering the usual fate of young women abducted by pirates. Nevertheless the Governor always made the hackles rise on his instinct for self-preservation. Here was another man whose eyes snapped “gallows” whenever he looked at Jack. In spite of the fact that he hadn’t laid a finger on the lass. Well not too many fingers anyway. He gave a sigh for lost opportunities. A sense of honour was a bloody nuisance for a pirate.  
  
Jack had a bad moment when Elizabeth began to explain Will’s plight to their rescuers. This was not the time for honest stupidity nor, for that matter, for stupid honesty. He needn’t have worried. Elizabeth was no Will Turner. The lass had a firm grasp of the need for subterfuge—as he should have remembered. She revealed only that Will had been taken captive by the pirates of the _Black Pearl_. Jack let himself breathe again.  
  
However, her story wasn’t going to be good enough. Jack, slouching with deceptive nonchalance by the rail, flanked by his increasingly familiar guard dogs, already knew that Elizabeth’s grand plan was going awry. The set of the _Dauntless_ ’s gradually filling sails meant Jamaica was their destination, rather than Isla de Muerta. He’d had doubts that the great British flagship would contain many who cared about the fate of an orphaned blacksmith’s apprentice. They had their governor’s daughter and a token pirate to hang for the attack on Port Royal—never mind he’d not even been involved. They’d be setting sail for their home port with all due speed.  
  
He watched as Elizabeth stood on the warm tarred planks and came to the same conclusion. No mean sailor herself, the bonnie lass. The delight drained out of her face like a rip tide, which was, in Jack’s opinion, a bloody shame.  
  
* * * * *   
  
As the combination of orders and movements about the ship registered with her, Elizabeth felt the sting of fear. No one was asking about the likeliest course of the _Black Pearl_. No one seemed concerned about Will. Her father, noticing her distress and misinterpreting its cause, reassured her that she would soon be home. But as Elizabeth stared around the decks of the _Dauntless_ at the indifferent faces of the men in whose hands lay Will’s fate, she began to feel that she no longer had a home to which to return. How could she have imagined that her world would have expanded to match the changes she felt in herself?   
  
Her father still saw her as the child which, to be honest, she hadn’t been for some time. But that child that she wasn’t was the only hope Will had. She had to find some way to make these bloody men care about him. She turned, ready to do battle with the only weapons available to her.  
  
Facing up to her father, she insisted that he look at her, begging, “But we’ve got to save Will!”   
  
* * * * *  
  
Jack watched every move of the little drama, seeking any sign of an opportune moment. He knew from experience how persistent the lass could be when she started in on this topic. But he wasn’t seeing anything encouraging.  
  
Governor Swann confronted his child. “No,” he told her firmly. “You’re safe now.” He held up his hands as though to restrain her next outburst.   
  
_You’re operating under a mistaken assumption, mate_ , Jack thought. _You thought you’d lost her, but can’t you see you’ll lose her again if you hold her back, just as surely as if you let her go?_  
  
Telepathy wasn’t working this morning because the Governor brushed by Elizabeth heading for the stairs of the quarterdeck where Norrington awaited him flanked by Gillette. Beside Jack, Mr. Murtogg was looking down, embarrassed to witness the family spat.   
  
“We will return to Port Royal immediately,” the Governor informed Elizabeth. “Not go gallivanting after pirates!”

Uh oh! Jack tensed as Elizabeth rushed after him, her lips pursed in anger. That was the wrong tone to take. The Governor's daughter might have been a child when she’d left Port Royal, but she wasn’t one any longer. He held up his hands as though he could physically realign the governor, but there was nothing he could do.  
  
Her voice bitter, Elizabeth accused, “Then we condemn him to death.”  
  
Governor Swann turned to frown at his undutiful offspring.

The Commodore glanced down and looked away; his mouth opened as if he might intervene, then shut as he swallowed his words, watching the Governor instead.   
  
Realizing he had taken a misstep with Elizabeth, Governor Swann chose his next words carefully—using his political voice, the voice of reason and good government: “The boy’s fate is regrettable, but, then, so was his decision to engage in piracy.”  
  
Norrington looked down again, refusing to meet Elizabeth’s eyes.

 _That’s right, mate, she won’t be forgiving any of you for this._ Jack tipped his head back in exasperation watching the sails still bracing for Port Royal. _C’mon you bloody fools! Give the girl this ship so I can go get mine!_ He gripped his hands together to still the urge to dislocate somebody’s arm. Several arms. Perhaps it was time to try a new tack. He opened his mouth, but was cut off before he could speak.  
  
In disbelief Elizabeth cried, “To rescue me! To prevent anything from happening to me!”   
  
Shedding Murtogg and Mulroy with an expert twitch of his shoulders, Jack stepped forward holding up his hand to claim the attention of the Commodore.  
  
“If I may be so bold as to inject my professional opinion,” he offered.   
  
His guards came scurrying along to catch up to their escapee as Jack dodged around Elizabeth and accosted the Governor and the Commodore. Governor Swan looked away in annoyance as Jack approached. Elizabeth twisted from glaring at her father to staring suspiciously at Jack.   
  
“ _The Pearl_ was listing near to scuppers after the battle,” he assured them, his voice coaxing, tempting. He arrived in front of Norrington, shaking his head regretfully. “It’s very unlikely she’ll be able to make good time.”   
  
The Commodore remained impassive.   
  
* * * * *  
  
Elizabeth watched with clenched teeth as Jack attempted to persuade Commodore Norrington to pursue the Black Pearl. The sense of her own failure pervaded her mind like dense smoke. She felt she would explode with impotent fury at her father, at Commodore Norrington, at the entire world to which she had been so eager to get back.  
  
All it had taken was one day on an island with Jack Sparrow to erode the shaky foundations of her upbringing. She’d always hated the constraints placed on her by her gender. Hated the fond dismissal of anything of importance she had to say. Hated her gentle exclusion from anything difficult or ugly or real. Hated the lace and silk and cotton wool that encompassed her narrowing life. Of all the men in her life, only Will had ever really looked at her. But since they’d grown up, he had dropped his eyes—had listened to her father’s warnings and had slipped back into the ritual of class divisions that she also hated.   
  
But Jack had been different. He was a grown man, a man used to holding authority as were most of the men who had surrounded her all her life. Nevertheless, he’d always seen her for what she was. Never simply pinned her in a box, labeled her, placed her on a high shelf, pulled her out only to admire. He had argued with her, mocked her, horrified her, laughed with her, tried to seduce her, but he had never dismissed her.   
  
Not as her father and Commodore Norrington were doing. The air was heavy with the sense of their indulgence and implacability. The men were in charge now.

_Time to take care of the little woman. Poor dear! She’s had such a horrible experience. Let’s get her home as fast as possible and forget anything has happened._

Elizabeth felt as helpless as she had on Barbossa’s ship—as though she had lost her voice and all her words fell away into some great chasm of silence.   
  
She had thought the only thing she had to escape was the island. But the chains not of iron looped about her, burning into her soul as Jack had foreseen they would.   
  
Jack had freed her from more than that dratted corset that day on the docks. And she’d developed a taste for that freedom. Who said only men could fight and sacrifice their lives? She had plunged a knife into the heart of a man so evil, hell itself had spat him back out. She had directed strategy in a sea battle between tall ships, bending a pirate crew to her will. She had fought immortal pirates with all the skill she possessed as a marksman, skill Will had imparted to her back when he still saw the person she was and not the lady into which she was being made. And she had held her own on a desert island with the legendary Captain Jack Sparrow—had in fact brought about their rescue. And if burning Jack’s rum hadn’t been risking her very life, she didn’t know what was.   
  
At the moment that cunning pirate was luring Norrington with his dulcet words. “Think about it,” he breathed, enticing—Lucifer himself might have charmed the angels out of heaven with such a voice. Elizabeth darted a glance between her father and the Commodore. What she saw was not encouraging. Her father and Norrington were no idealistic angels. She could tell that Jack saw it too.   
  
“The _Black Pearl_ ,” he urged, his eyebrows raised. Even now he gave her name like a man might sigh the name of his beloved—as if he were offering up to Norrington his greatest treasure. “The last real pirate threat in the Caribbean, mate,” he continued, smiling with desperate temptation. Eyes wide, Jack leaned into Norrington’s face, invading his personal space as though he could force his will through air alone and in through the Commodore’s eyes. “How can you pass that up?”

However, Norrington flinched away from the pirate’s admittedly unsavory breath.   
  
His gaze cold and unmoving, Commodore Norrington answered Jack, contempt dripping from his voice, “By remembering that I serve others, Mr. Sparrow, not only myself.”   
  
That was James all over, Elizabeth reflected. The ultimate self-sacrificing public servant. Captain Sparrow would never comprehend such a man. But how could she use that trait to her advantage? Jack was wasting his time. Even now, she could see his plan failing. Could see that Commodore Norrington was dismissing the pirate in the same way he had dismissed her—as though the worthlessness of what he had to say were a foregone conclusion, an inconvenient rattle to be endured and if possible silenced with as little fuss as possible. Norrington would never budge one iota for his own gain. But could he be convinced he was doing it for someone else’s sake?  
  
* * * * *  
  
Jack could have cheerfully shot Norrington right in his smug official face. If he had his hands on his pistol. If he hadn’t already vowed to use that shot on Barbossa. The man was made of solid iron. Not a human chink in him. Mark down another reason why Jack hated dealing with the Royal Navy. They did not have any of the same motivations as normal men. He’d rather bargain with Barbossa, whose twisted desires he at least understood.

* * * * *  
  
Elizabeth saw Jack glance uneasily at the Governor and back to Norrington, smiling almost as though he were nervous. She remembered what he had said to her about his fate if he was captured by the British Navy again. This was a man who was fighting for his life. But the Commodore had already turned his back on Jack and was following Lieutenant Gillette up the steps to the quarterdeck. To him, Jack Sparrow had no value at all.   
  
However, even if Jack and _The Pearl_ had no value in Norrington’s world, Elizabeth knew that she had one commodity left that did hold its value in his market. She had one golden coin to spend. The question was whether she could bear to spend it. This would not be some weak transaction easily annulled. This would be a sacrifice sealed with her body and blood and sacred honour. For the first time she would offer her word in all seriousness—the only word she knew would be heard. For Will’s sake Elizabeth knew she could do it. But she did not know if she could survive the crack of her heart when she did.  
  
Elizabeth called up the nightmare picture of that cave on Isla de Muerta, envisioning Will standing there before that stone chest of blood-stained gold. She heard again Jack’s answer. They would kill Bootstrap’s son. She had to save him. Her own survival was not an option anymore. Elizabeth Swann must die so that Will Turner might live.   
  
Jack was looking as dejected as she had ever seen him, his slight quicksilver form trapped motionless between the two husky, stolid marines. As she slipped past him, she touched his arm in a brief moment of encouragement, whether his or her own she couldn’t have said. Then she was alone before the quarterdeck. Her father reached out to stop her from bothering the Commodore, but Elizabeth was finished heeding her father’s wishes. She shrugged away from him. 

* * * * *  
  
“Commodore,” Elizabeth called to Norrington, her eyes beseeching. “I beg you, please do this.”  
  
Hemmed in by his honour guard, Jack waited, poised with bated breath, his hands straining and still. Elizabeth had one more plan. And he’d already developed a healthy respect for the lass’s plans. They had a naïve, bloody, vicious brilliance to them that he admired—preferably from a distance. She counted no cost, did Will’s bonnie lass, not to herself, nor to anyone else. But she was no fool.   
  
Halting at the bottom of the stairs, Elizabeth looked up at the Commodore. Her voice was soft, pleading. “For me,” she entreated. “As a wedding gift.”   
  
Optimism coursed back through Jack, and he let out a small sigh of sheer relief. The bonnie lass was a bloody genius! He’d like to see the man who could resist those fervent self-sacrificing eyes.   
  
Norrington pivoted in shock and stared at the girl.  
  
Governor Swann looked incredulous and delighted, beginning to smile. “Elizabeth!” he exclaimed. “Are you accepting the Commodore’s proposal?   
  
The proud papa was swift to change his disapproving tune when his little girl danced to his piping, Jack decided. But Elizabeth did not have about her the air of a woman giving herself joyously into the hands of her beloved.  
  
There was in her face the look that had been on Will’s face when he had stood on the rail of the Pearl and had thrown down his gauntlet to Barbossa: “You can’t die, but I can.” All sacrifice and glorious stupidity. But sometimes a little stupidity was the only thing left—when cunning and logic and treachery and bribery had failed. Jack understood that fatal last strike only too well—the death blow that took a man down with his enemy when the goal was more vital than life itself.

Miss Swann was striking her colours. She’d had only one chance, and she was taking it like a martyr.

* * * * *  
  
Elizabeth answered her father, quietly and firmly, looking up into Norrington’s stunned face, “I am.”  
  
There. She had done it. She had given her answer to James’s proposal. Had thrown her dice, played her last trump, gambled her last sovereign. The chains drew more tightly about her chest, graying her vision. Could imaginary chains choke a person in reality? It seemed so. Whatever happened now for Will, she had spent her life for his here on the deck of the _Dauntless_.

* * * * *  
  
Jack, on the other hand, was elated. _That’s it lass! Use any weapon that comes to your hand!_ Whirling about, he pounced with grimy fingers on the disgusted Mulroy’s pristine white uniform front and crossed baldrics.   
  
“A wedding! I love weddings!” he crowed, his grin showing every one of his gold teeth. Waving his arms festively, he shouted, “Drinks all around!”   
  
He stood corrected. Apparently Navy men had one motivation in common with normal men. Just his misfortune that it wasn’t one he could take advantage of. But Elizabeth had proved herself ruthless enough to take that advantage. The girl bore watching. He could feel the Commodore wavering, could already see him falling. This was a prize no man of sense would turn down. A Plan of his own was unfurling itself swiftly in Jack’s fertile brain.   
  
Elizabeth glanced at him suspiciously, distracted for a moment. The bonnie lass was too sharp for his good, Jack reflected. But she did not swerve from her own goal, returning her gaze to the Commodore’s grim countenance. _Good girl. You just keep your bloody fiancé in line and leave ol’ Jack to his own devices._  
  
He noticed the Commodore eyeing him after his outburst rather as a man looks at something he is going to have to scrape off his boot. In a burst of merriment, Jack raised his eyebrows, wiped off his delighted expression and assumed one of ardent and phony contrition.  
  
“I know,” he smiled placatingly, holding up his hands with wrists pressed together. “Clap him in irons, right?”  
  
Norrington did not appear amused. Jaw clenched, lips pressed together in annoyance, he descended several stairs towards the pirate and bane of his life.  
  
“Mr. Sparrow,” he snapped coldly.  
  
Jack dropped his hands, the smile gone as though it had never been there. He grimaced. How he hated a man with no sense of humour!

* * * * *  
  
Elizabeth found herself mouthing, “It’s Captain, Captain Sparrow!” since Jack wasn’t in a position to insist on anything.  
  
“You will accompany these fine men to the helm,” Norrington continued in that same icy tone, his eyes sweeping the decks of the Dauntless, “and provide us with the bearing to Isla de Muerta.” He glared back at the pirate.  
  
Elizabeth let out her breath, eyes still on the commodore, her face sober. This was her reward—the result she had been scheming to achieve. She could not summon up any emotion beyond a bedrock sense of accomplishment. Jack would have to be excited enough for both of them.

* * * * *  
  
“You will then spend the rest of the voyage contemplating all possible meanings of the phrase ‘silent as the grave.’” Norrington’s level voice still managed to contain enough venom to do justice to that veiled threat.   
  
Jack opened his mouth but no words seemed adequate. He tilted his head quizzically, then pressed his lips together in a small insincere smile. Correction—he hated a man with an absolutely vile sense of humour.  
  
With quiet loathing, Norrington prompted the pirate, “Do I make myself clear?”  
  
Jack shrugged. “Inescapably clear,” he said with a sour smile. All puns are intended, he thought bitterly as Murtogg and Mulroy nodded to each other then, gripping him roughly by the arms, dragged him off towards the helm.   
  
TBC


	3. Someone Always Pays the Price

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> One person’s triumph is often another’s tragedy. There’s always another side to the story. The deleted scene of the Proposal mostly from Norrington’s POV but some from Governor Swann and a little from Elizabeth. Angst alert. But some fun young Elizabeth.

Weatherby Swann glanced from Elizabeth’s pale face to the Commodore’s stern one. It was his dearest desire to see his daughter safely under the protection of a good man like his friend James Norrington. Safe, please God. She was his only child. The light of his life. All that remained to him of the beauty and vibrancy that had been his wife. When those savage pirates had kidnapped her, he’d never known such terror, such anger. He hadn’t known his heart could endure such pain and still keep beating. To spare her a moment of the anguish she must have gone through, he would have suffered any torture himself. When he had insisted on coming with the Dauntless, he had desired nothing more than to avenge every indignity she might have suffered. If they had harmed a hair on her head, he had sworn he would see every last one of them in hell—either sunk to the bottom of the sea or strung up on the gallows. He’d had no hope that such depraved criminals would not harm her.   
  
But now she was miraculously restored to him, and while his rage burned against the men who had battered her, wounded her, and left her to die, his overwhelming instinct was to get her to safety as swiftly as possible. Pursuit of pirates could wait.   
  
But somewhere in the trauma of her week of captivity, Elizabeth had grown into an awareness of her own power. She had manipulated James like an expert swordsman drives an opponent into a corner. All to save a blacksmith’s apprentice she had befriended as a child. And now, instead of flying home to Port Royal and safety, she was about to undertake another perilous adventure. If the Commodore did as she had requested, they would soon be back under the guns of that ghostly galleon that had sprung up out of black night with cannons blazing. And his precious little girl would be in the midst of fire and fighting and flying shrapnel. He must stop this, if at all possible.  
  
Hurrying up to Norrington, he objected, “Commodore, I must question the wisdom of this.”  
  
But he was already too late.   
  
* * * * *   
  
Commodore Norrington felt himself being pulled in too many different directions. Painstakingly he had sorted through the threads that entangled him, seeking the course wherein lay his duty. He had not been completely comfortable with the Governor’s decision to abandon the boy Turner. While the lad’s actions had been rash, he had, it seemed, managed to pry Elizabeth out of the hands of the crew of the _Black Pearl_. Of course, she had then fallen into the hands of that pirate Sparrow who had been on the loose thanks to Will, but that had turned out far better than he’d been given reason to expect. While the boy deserved punishment, the kind of death he would find at the hands of pirates was far beyond his due. And Norrington was not a man who sought petty vengeance against a rival.  
  
Nor had he been sure that his duty to maintain law and order in the Caribbean did not demand that he pursue the _Black Pearl_ while he had the chance and the benefit of Sparrow’s expert knowledge of the ship and its crew—although Sparrow’s clear desire to chase after that ship had been the strongest argument against that course of action. But the _Black Pearl_ would still be there for the chasing, more’s the pity, at a later date.  
  
No. What had decided him to bend to the Governor’s will had been the knowledge that such a course of action would remove Elizabeth to safety. That was the Governor’s motive, and it was one of which Norrington approved.   
  
But he had not expected the outcome of that decision. Instead of accepting the judgment of those who had her best interests at heart, his fiery beloved had turned and faced them down. Had rejected protection and safety and had demanded that Will Turner be rescued. James Norrington had the grace to be ashamed, both of his tacit willingness to leave Will to his fate, and for his underestimation of Elizabeth’s courage and loyalty.   
  
Now his old friend was questioning his change of orders. He knew it must appear that he was going against his better judgment for the sake of a green girl’s emotional outburst, but James Norrington had never led with his heart. Oh, he was glad he could indulge Elizabeth’s evident desire within the bounds of his duty. But he would never have sacrificed that duty to her pleading eyes. He was sorry for the Governor. He knew the anguish the man had suffered over the last week—knew how much he must be dreading further heart-break. But he must pursue the course he knew was correct.   
  
Firmly he informed the older man, “With all due respect, Governor, Mr. Turner is a subject of the British Crown and therefore under my protection.” He had to force himself to meet his friend’s stricken eyes. Pressing his lips together, he braced himself for Governor Swann’s outburst.   
  
It did not come. He should have known that a good man such as Weatherby Swann would support right action once it was pointed out to him.   
  
* * * * *   
  
The Governor glanced once towards his daughter, then looked back at Commodore Norrington with a half smile. They were two of a kind, his daughter and the good Commodore. No personal sacrifice would turn either of them from a course they had deemed right. Elizabeth was willing to risk her life to save the boy who had saved her life. The Commodore was willing to do the same.   
  
Governor Swann knew he was not a brave man. Oh, he could stand on the battlements during a cannonade if he felt it was his duty. But he would not choose a course of danger when another option existed. It had been a mistake for him to try to force Elizabeth into his own mould. She was her mother’s daughter in more than her sparkling brown eyes. He nodded to himself and looked up at the Commodore with a fuller smile. If the man felt it was his duty to rescue Will Turner, there was nothing to be done about it. A hundred guns had no chance of turning James aside from doing what he believed was right.   
  
And so he gave his approval to the Commodore’s decision to provide Crown protection to the blacksmith’s apprentice. “Rightly so,” he agreed.  
  
But his heart failed him as he thought of what might lie ahead.  
  
* * * * *  
  
The slightest sympathetic smile touched the corners of James Norrington’s mouth as he watched the Governor fight and win that battle. There were many kinds of heroism, not the least of which was the bravery of a man who was naturally timid. He saw Governor Swann glance over at his daughter standing by the ship’s rail, looking pale and tired. She had been through such an ordeal already. His heart longed to remove her from all this danger and bloodshed, but she had made that impossible.  
  
When Weatherby Swann looked back at James Norrington, the governor seemed older somehow. His eyes held a look of bewildered loss that touched the Commodore.   
  
“Take care of her,” the Governor requested in a voice that trembled a little.   
  
Norrington smiled more fully at his friend, a promise in his eyes. _Of course. You did not need to ask._ He looked down, knowing he wanted nothing more than to obey the Governor’s wishes. It had been his dream ever since the moment he had realized that the child he had known had become a beautiful woman he did not know.   
  
When he had first met Elizabeth on the crossing of the Atlantic, she had been a sparkling mischievous little—well, “monkey” came to mind, also “minx” and “brat.” Nothing was safe or sacred from her inquisitive, adventuresome ways. Whenever she went missing and her concerned papa would bustle about nervously, she would be found in some new, unthought-of location in the ship—splashing about in the bilges; perching on the fighting top; chasing rats in the ship’s stores; once even conversing with a sailor under discipline in the brig. The galley, the gun decks, the bowsprit (that had given them all a turn); the captain’s cabin (for which she had received a sound scolding); the quarterdeck where only officers were allowed; the forecastle racks (to try out a hammock, and she’d had fleas for the rest of the trip). Once she had made it up the rigging to the top gallant yard before she was missed. Fearless and intrepid and adorable and as ubiquitous as a cockroach. Whatever a man most particularly wanted her not to see or hear, there she would be found wide-eyed and open-eared.   
  
The men had loved her, given her trinkets gleaned from their travels, told her wild and unfortunately off-colour tales of their adventures, taught her rollicking songs, and assisted her in her insatiable thirst for knowledge of ships and the sea. If a gently-born girl could become a cabin boy, Elizabeth nearly had. She’d learnt navigation and had sweet-talked her way into taking the helm on more than one occasion. In fact she’d been a quicker study than the actual cabin boys. Once when they’d thought they might be engaged by an enemy ship, he’d been horrified to find her helping the powder monkey. Fortunately that encounter had come to naught. The _Dauntless_ was a power with which to be reckoned and few ships chose to take the risk.  
  
When young Will Turner had joined them, the mischief had doubled. He’d caught them having a duel—with un-bated blades. Pranks abounded. A rather badly drawn charcoal mermaid had appeared on the main chart in the captain’s cabin. Mice showed up in sea boots. Once, the captain’s dinner had been served to the crew. It had been a journey he’d never forget, and one of which he’d been glad to see the end.  
  
He had been relieved when they’d reached Port Royal and little Elizabeth Swann was still in one piece—brown as a berry, entirely freckled, and with the vocabulary of a navy tar—but missing no limbs.   
  
There, the new Governor had assumed control over the gradually recovering capitol of Jamaica. As commander of Fort Charles, James had worked closely with the man to resurrect the city from the aftermath of the great earthquake that had nearly destroyed it, and he had been surprised and delighted to discover that it was no hardship; that somehow, they had become friends.   
  
And so he had often met Elizabeth in long relaxed evenings at the Swann’s home, where she had plied him with questions about his adventures at sea and the battles in which he had fought and the strategies that had prevailed. She’d been as eager and bright as a young ensign, forcing him to recall minute details of wind and sea and the placement of men, occasionally offering suggestions that were ludicrous, but sometimes he was surprised to realize that her strategy might have turned the tide sooner or entirely in some past action.  
  
That had been one of the reasons he had felt she would be such an ideal wife for him. They were already friends, and she would understand his duties and his love of the sea. Now, it seemed his dreams were about to be fulfilled.

He should have been happy.  
  
At the sound of Governor Swann’s footsteps heading up the stairs to the quarterdeck, Norrington looked up from his musings. The moment to which he had been looking forward and which he had been dreading had come.   
  
How he wished that Elizabeth had not felt so trapped that she had to barter her consent to his proposal for his consent to rescue Will Turner. James felt an unjust rush of anger at Will for coming between Elizabeth and him in what should have belonged to the two of them alone. For making what should have been a joyous occasion, unclouded by any doubt, into this painfully tense moment.  
  
Glancing over at Elizabeth who was staring fixedly at the deck, James Norrington compared this strained silent woman with the laughing eager-eyed girl they had rescued and his heart constricted. Something was very wrong here.   
  
Softly he spoke her name: “Elizabeth.”  
  
She looked up at him, her eyes large and haunted. He held out his arm to her as one might to a frightened little bird. What had happened? What had he unwittingly done to make her so afraid? He had never really considered Will Turner a serious rival for Elizabeth’s regard. He had assumed that Will was merely suffering from calf love and would eventually transfer his attentions to a young woman more suited to his station. But now he knew an insidious fear that Elizabeth’s affections had been truly engaged by young William, and her bargain with himself was nothing more than a desperate attempt to save not just her childhood friend, but the man she truly loved. He shied away from the thought, but it persisted.  
  
For a moment he thought Elizabeth might refuse to come to him, might indeed just remain there frozen and staring at his arm forever. But finally she moved to his side, and he felt the feather light brush of her fingers resting on his sleeve.   
  
* * * * *  
  
Elizabeth had watched as the exchange of property had taken place between her father and . . . her fiancé, she thought the word for the first time. She felt drained, emptied of all volition, more exhausted than after the battle on the _Interceptor_. She could see that James was holding out his arm towards her, but she couldn’t seem to move towards him.   
  
The finality of her bargain terrified her. What had she done?

She met the Commodore’s worried eyes. What had she done to him?

Whatever it had been, an eternal knell had sounded. She had given her word. He was holding out his arm to her. Claiming what she had promised to him. As though she were walking on the bottom of the sea, she moved towards him and set her hand as lightly as possible on his sleeve, feeling his muscles tense beneath the fabric.

If only it were Will to whom she was promised.

But that could never be, now.  
  
* * * * *

Norrington looked into the dark eyes of the woman he loved, searching for some answer to his questions. But Elizabeth’s eyes only raised more questions. He bowed his head, searching for the right words. “I am . . .” he hesitated, looking up, “. . . concerned that your answer was perhaps . . .” He halted, mouth still open, but no inspired eloquence dropped like live coals on his tongue. Lowering his head again, he swallowed hard and took a couple of deep breaths before turning to face her. “. . . less than sincere,” he finished.

  
Elizabeth gazed seriously up at him, silent for a moment. He knew, then. Or he suspected. She supposed she had been very obvious. But he did not understand. She had not been lying to him. Dropping her eyes, she began. “I would not give my word lightly.” When she glanced up, Commodore Norrington had closed his eyes and turned away from her.

  
“Yes, I understand.” James kept his voice low and reassuring, trying not to drive Elizabeth into withdrawing further. Opening his eyes, he tilted his head back and gazed at the hard blue sky, pursing his lips. This certainly qualified as the most difficult conversation he had ever held. But if they were ever to have a chance at finding love out of all this mistrust, he needed to speak to her. Taking a deep breath, he turned to look at her. Even grimy and soot-covered, she was still the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. “But is it so wrong,” his voice held a note of plea, “that I should want it given unconditionally?”  
  


Elizabeth found she could not look at the commodore. No it was not wrong. A man like James deserved everything whole and perfect in love—not this crippled, broken gift she had to give him. She must never let him know. She must not hurt him any more.   
  
“It is not a condition,” she insisted softly, trying to smile. “It is a request.”   
  
She bowed her head looking blindly at her hands on the Dauntless’s railing, then equally blindly she gazed out to the sea. Somewhere out there was freedom. But she had made her choice. There had never been any real hope for freedom for the governor’s daughter. She only had the right to choose her own chains. And she had chosen.   
  
“Your answer would not change mine,” she reassured James. The truth was a bitter thing, not at all like the stories. But she and James respected one another. Surely on that, they could build a life somehow bearable for both of them. And she could tell he loved her.   
  
“You are a . . . fine man, James,” she told him.

Nothing she had ever done in her life had prepared her for the difficulty of this moment. But she managed to turn and look into his concerned and loving eyes. She managed to lift the corners of her mouth in a smile. She managed not to weep.   
  


James Norrington knew Elizabeth did not love him the way he did her. She trembled beside him, promising him her life, demanding nothing in return, asking only one boon. But she was still the woman he would choose above all others. And she would not break her word.   
  
“Well. Very well.” His voice was sober, not hopeful as it should have been. But surely, with time, he could win her heart. At least now he would have that chance.

He looked down at the lovely woman who had agreed to be his bride. She smiled bravely up at him. His own smile grew more genuine for a moment.   
  
“Excellent,” he breathed.  
  
But why did gaining his heart’s desire feel so much like losing everything he held dear?  
  
TBC


	4. All I Ask Is a Tall Ship

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jack is itching to get his hands on the Dauntless. Tag with Murtogg and Mulroy. The commodore shows up. We have now abandoned the movie and are sailing uncharted seas. Just some fun playing with an idea I got from Ted and Terry and Co. that Jack is hooked up to the universe a little differently than most. He seems to know what the weather will be before anyone else, and anyone who would sail the Interceptor in that sort of storm without reefing her sails has to be either mad or a genius at knowing just how to sail to avoid split canvas and snapped spars—or both. Hey, I know it was a model. You know it was a model. But in the movie universe that storm happened.

Jack was pacing about the _Dauntless_ ’s poop deck like a caged animal. Murtogg and Mulroy were puffing to keep up with him, which as far as he was concerned, they deserved for the way they had hauled him around like he was a barrel of salt cod-fish. He was quite sure he would soon combust with frustration. It would take a month of holystoning to remove the groove he’d wear in the deck.  
  
Provide them with a bearing, Norrington had ordered. But what bloody use was that when this behemoth might as well be becalmed?  
  
The _Dauntless_ was a lumbering cow elephant of a ship. Her purpose as a first-rate ship of the line was the deliberate movement of those hundred guns to any Caribbean hot spot. Even wounded as she was, the _Black Pearl_ was likely capable of sailing circles around the _Dauntless_ , in spite of what he had told Norrington. And with the curse upon her, there was no telling what she might be able to do. To be trying to catch her in this battle wagon seemed well nigh impossible.  
  
But a charging elephant has a surprising turn of speed. The problem was that no one on this ship had goaded the _Dauntless_ into putting on that speed. Even without his hand on her helm, Jack could tell from the set of her sails and the feel of the sea under her keel that he could pull at least another knot out of this monster if they’d let him give the orders.  
  
The _Dauntless_ was close hauled on the starboard tack, but he knew she could be sailed closer to the wind. There was a fine line in a square-rigged ship between her fastest speed and stalling if she came just too far over. Jack had pushed the ships he’d piloted and captained to the edge for so long that he knew he could take over the _Dauntless_ with scarcely a shiver in her sails and drive her as far as she’d stand.   
  
Then there was the problem of her course. He’d given the helmsman the bearing to Isla de Muerta, but leaving up to that dull man the ways and means of actually getting there when they were forced to tack into the wind and sail against a head sea was proving to be a bad idea. He’d swear the man was paying no attention at all to the sea if he didn’t know that his own sense of it was on the shady side of abnormal.   
  
Bootstrap had used to shake his head and tell Jack that a hundred years earlier they’d have burnt him at the stake for witchcraft.

But it was all there for anyone to find, wasn’t it? The ever-changing pattern of the waves, the rhythm of light stretching across the water to the horizon, the shimmer of the dance of the air, the racing courses of the clouds, the capricious shifts in wind and air pressure, the variations in temperature, the slopes and angles of nearby land, the breathing of the ship and the seas and the life above and below the water. It was all connected. Push on one part and it all moved. A quickening in the wind seven leagues away changed the air where he was standing. The very fact that the _Dauntless_ was moving through wind and waves and sky was altering the entire picture.   
  
A man in a crowded room would look up when a door slammed, knowing someone had just entered. That was all it was. Just listening for what was happening, anticipating what would happen. Not, he’d insisted to Bootstrap, anything to carry cold iron against.  
  
But this helmsman was not listening and he’d swear the mate who was navigating was blind. Oh, he was clever enough with the sextant, always knew where they were. But he had no ability to tell where they wanted to be instead. The officers would order a course change when Jack knew that ten more minutes on the same tack would bring them to an air current far swifter than the one the ship was labouring under now. And even worse, the great head seas were crashing against the bow of the ship, sometimes burying her bowsprit, spritsail and jib boom and washing over the decks. Granted, the _Dauntless_ would never skip as lightly through such seas as the _Pearl_ , but she could move through them infinitely more gracefully and hence speedily if the helmsman had even half an idea where they’d be and adjusted her course accordingly—which was admittedly a trick when one was sailing as close to the wind as Jack liked.  
  
They were almost a day behind the _Black Pearl_ , a faster ship sailing under a curse. She would go where Barbossa wished, as far as he could tell from the brief, wondrous, and terrible time he’d spent aboard her benumbed decks. She’d seemed nearly unconscious to him then. But the curse drove her on. Their only hope of catching her lay in the fact that Barbossa had always been as senseless as the _Dauntless_ ’s crew—with the added bonus that he could no longer feel. He would not be taking the swiftest course, but he would be inexorable. For that reason the _Dauntless_ must sail as fast as ever she could.   
  
Jack needed to get his hands on this ship. He needed to give the commands. A navy crew made up in discipline what it lacked in imagination, if he could just get them to cooperate. But the problem seemed to be that no one knew just where a captive pirate captain fell on the chain of command.  
  
At last he could endure it no longer. The mate had just begun bellowing out the orders for a tack that Jack knew, from the soles of his feet to his wind-whipped hair, was going to take them into a current that, combined with the head seas, would result in their losing way.   
  
“Belay that order!” he snapped out as he would have on the quarterdeck of the Pearl.

The crew responded instinctively to the authority in that voice and halted in their tracks, but the mate rounded on Jack like a striking snake. The hulking officer towered over the pirate, but Jack Sparrow could project an aura of menacing command, rather like a cat fluffing out its fur, that completely belied the disparity in size. The big man took a step back.   
  
“Look, mate,” Jack attempted reason first. “You’re about to head us into a passel o’ trouble. We need to stay on this course for another thirty minutes at least. There’s a current out there you don’t want to be running into.”   
  
The mate’s lip curled in scorn. “I don’t know who you think you are, pirate, but this is a King’s ship, and I give the orders here.” He nodded to Murtogg and Mulroy, “Lock him in the brig!”  
  
Jack dodged the clumsy attempts to restrain him. “Take my word for it, man!” He scooted around the helm just ahead of the galumphing Mulroy. “This is the best course to be holding.” Which was more than could be said of most of the courses the _Dauntless_ had been put on so far. He eluded Murtogg’s wild grasp. “We’ll have better winds and calmer seas in another thirty minutes.”   
  
“Maybe he knows something . . .what . . . what he’s talking about,” Murtogg suggested helpfully. “Commodore Norrington did say he was supposed to give us the bearing.”   
  
Jack nearly forgave him for the corset incident.   
  
The mate eyed the pirate consideringly.

The chase having died down, Jack slowed to a brisk pace again.  
  
“I’m having a thought here,” Jack coaxed, making the man spin around to follow him. “What say I tell you how to set the sails and where to steer. I know how to get us to that island as quick as a cabin boy to mess. You give the orders, and ‘Robert’s your uncle,’ the commodore will think you’re the best navigator in the fleet, eh? What say you to that?” He halted on the other side of the helm.  
  
“Think a lot of yourself, don’t you?” the man growled belligerently.  
  
“I’m not thinking about myself at all,” Jack snapped. “I’m thinking about how many seconds it takes a man to bleed to death when his throat’s been cut.” He drew an illustrative finger across his neck.  
  
The man looked confused.  
  
“The future Mrs. Commodore wants young Mr. Turner alive and well,” Jack explained impatiently. “And every minute you’re wasting, lad, makes that outcome more and more unlikely.” Not to mention that he needed Will alive himself.   
  
“Now,” he barked at the officer. “Are you going to do what I tell you, like a sensible man, or do I have to get Miss Elizabeth up here to give the orders?” It was a threat, whether the man recognized it or not.  
  
“What?” sneered the mate. “Hiding behind the lady’s skirts, eh, pirate?”  
  
“Son,” Jack rolled his eyes. “She’s got more clout than me. I’d be a bloody idiot not to let her use it.”  
  
“What seems to be the problem here?”   
  
Ah! The perfect addition to this little discussion. Just what Jack needed—Commodore interference. Actually what he really needed was rum. But no one looked likely to be giving him some anytime soon. He thought wistfully of the rum Elizabeth had burnt.   
  
“Well now!” Jack pasted on an artificial welcoming smile and turned to face Norrington. “Just who I was wanting to see,” he lied.   
  
“Mr. Sparrow,” sighed the commodore. “You are causing a disturbance on my poop deck. You are interfering with the functioning of this vessel. Just what part of the word ‘silent’ would you like me to clarify for you?”  
  
“That would be Captain Sparrow, if you please, sir,” Jack reminded Norrington yet again.   
  
“Sparrow, this ship already has a captain, and you are avoiding my question.”  
  
Jack would have preferred to be avoiding the Commodore. “Look, mate,” he explained. “Your officers here were all set to be ordering the _Dauntless_ into a bloody great head-on current. I didn’t think you’d want us dead in the water, so I took the liberty of suggesting that they remain on this course until we’re out of range of that current.”  
  
“And how do you come to know about this current?”  
  
This was not an explanation he planned to be giving the Commodore. Jack remained silent.   
  
“Sailed here before, have you?”  
  
“Yes, if you like,” Jack prevaricated. No point in pulling out a useless truth when a far more functional lie would suffice. He’d not actually approached the island from this direction before, although he’d known the current would be out here somewhere.   
  
“Very well, Mr. Sparrow. Since you are familiar with the area, you will give to these fine gentlemen any information that will increase our chances of catching the _Black Pearl_. Gentlemen,” he addressed the men on the deck. “You will follow Mr. Sparrow’s . . . directions . . . unless it seems obvious that he is trying to sink us.”   
  
Jack noticed the Commodore couldn’t bring himself to say “orders.”  
  
Nevertheless, that was almost reasonable of the Commodore. Jack gave Elizabeth credit. She could wrap a man around her little finger tighter than a chain on a windlass. Norrington obviously knew that they were playing a long shot here and had decided to gamble. Jack turned to the helm, his entire body tingling with the knowledge that the ship was now, to all intents and purposes, his.   
  
First he had to get Madame Behemoth closer to the wind.

* * * * *  
  
James Norrington retired to his cabin, his skin crawling. Had he really just given control of his ship to a pirate? He needed to have his head examined when he got back to Port Royal.  
  
TBC


	5. An Island that Cannot be Found

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which we discover why Isla de Muerta can’t be found, Lady Fortune has it in for Jack, and Norrington discusses with Gillette, Groves, and the Governor whether to gamble on Jack Sparrow even though he seems to be about to sink them all. Still sailing uncharted waters.

Isla de Muerta. An island that cannot be found except by those who already know where it is. A mystical explanation for a very practical navigational problem.   
  
Isla de Muerta was part of a tiny, obscure archipelago of volcanic islands caught in one of the swiftest great currents of the Caribbean. The waters in the narrow passages through that chain of islands surged with ship-crushing force. Furthermore, the great stretches of the wider channels concealed beneath their treacherous surfaces rocks that reached up to claw at the bellies of the unfortunate ships who attempted to navigate them.   
  
There were, in fact, only two passages that would allow an approach to the Island of Death—only two narrow chasms deep enough for a hull and keel between the snarling, jagged rocks. Both required a ship to sail against that deadly current and to tack up the prevailing winds—winds that could rise up with fatal force creating unpredictable monster waves that would plummet any vessel to the ocean floor. Only a great ship could carry enough canvas to harness those winds and fight that current. But that same great ship would scarcely find the sea room to maneuver. These passages were fretted and festooned with the crumbling lace-work of spars and hulls and the bones of men who had had the audacity to pit themselves against Isla de Muerta for the sake of wealth beyond the dreams of avarice. Only the hammerhead sharks that leisurely patrolled these ruins knew the terrible stories of their last moments.   
  
The first of these passages was slightly less dangerous. It was wider and the current was not as fierce. However, it was a long and circuitous route. A man in a hurry might choose to gamble on the second passage. This narrow band would take a ship nearly straight to the island. However, in the necessary tacks there would be no margin for error. If the ship did not respond instantly—if the wind shifted slightly—if a man made a single miscall—all would be lost. The least failure of momentum and the current would be waiting to smash a ship back against the rocks. No survivor had ever brought back a record of the price Isla de Muerta exacted for a failed passage. The silent spars that jutted up out of the restless water bore the only memorial to those failures.  
  
Only one fragment of a chart existed of these narrow gateways to the island and the fabled Treasure of Cortez. And that parchment fragment lay in the captain’s cabin of the _Black Pearl_. Barbossa would take the easier route, Jack knew. He would have done so himself, given the choice. But so far Lady Fortune had not seen fit to allow him that comfortable option. He always had to arrive at that bloody archipelago in hotfoot pursuit of the _Black Pearl_. The first time he had navigated that death-edged strip of sea, he had been aboard the _Interceptor_ , sleek and fast, shallow in the draft, small and quicksilver to handle. She might have been designed with such a passage in mind. He’d also had the advantage of daylight, which at least allowed some visibility ahead in the banks of cursed fog.  
  
Jack’s fortunes were not improving.

This time around it would be the middle of the night. The moon would be up but would be of precious little use in all that fog. And the gods had seen fit to grant him Madame Behemoth—the _Dauntless_. Even Jack quailed at the thought of the hair-trigger maneuvers he’d have to push that matronly whale through. He cursed the circumstances that forced him into such an attempt.

This was his only chance to pit the firepower of the _Dauntless_ against Barbossa and his crew while the _Pearl_ would be safe.   
  
Even now, Commodore Norrington was meeting with his officers to decide whether Jack would be allowed to make that attempt.   
  
* * * * *  
  
In the officer’s stateroom aboard the _Dauntless,_ four men clustered around the heavy mahogany table in the flickering lamplight. Commodore Norrington sat at its head flanked on the one hand by Lieutenant Groves and on the other by Governor Swann. Lieutenant Gillette was still caroming about the room in agitation. James had shed his role as commander of the ship and invited his men to be candid with him.  
  
“I can’t, in good conscience make this a unilateral decision, gentlemen. So let’s dispense with the military despotism for the moment. I need sound counsel, not subordinate toadying,” he told them. “Andrew, Theodore, Governor Swann, we’ve been flying in pursuit of the _Black Pearl_ for the better part of a day now and the time has come to decide whether we will continue with this rescue mission or abandon it.”  
  
The only sounds now were the creaks and groans of the _Dauntless_ as she made her way towards Isla de Muerta.

Gillette forced himself to pause and take the fourth chair facing his commanding officer. He knew what was coming.  
  
Norrington continued, “I’ll be blunt with you, my friends. I don’t like this situation at all. We are sailing in uncharted waters with only Jack Sparrow’s word that he knows where we are going. Now, he tells me, we are coming up to a difficult passage through a narrow channel against a strong current with a head wind. In spite of this wind, he has assured me there will be fog. He has, to all intents and purposes, demanded that I hand over full command of this vessel to him as the maneuvering will be tricky and the shorter the chain of command the faster the orders will be obeyed. My questions to you are these. Do we go on? And do we give Sparrow his head with the _Dauntless_?”  
  
“Commodore,” Gillette began, his hands clasped earnestly before him on the table.  
  
“It’s James tonight, Andrew,” Norrington interrupted, waving his hand dismissively. “The tiresome Commodore has retired to his berth, as we should all like to do. I think we can dispense with him for the time being.”  
  
“James, then,” Gillette agreed, pausing and then rushing on. “Respectfully sir, are you out of your mind?”  
  
“Only you, Andrew, could even begin to ask that question respectfully.” Norrington smiled tiredly. “What particular action of mine is causing you to suspect my sanity this time?”  
  
“Sir, you would not have called this meeting if you weren’t seriously considering doing what Sparrow has requested,” Gillette accused. “James, the man is a Bedlamite! He looks like a fool and acts like a Tortuga whore! He can barely walk upright! If I didn’t know for a fact that he’s had no access to alcohol this entire day, I’d swear he’d completely shot the cat!”  
  
“Setting aside for the moment the intriguing question of how you come to be so familiar with the mannerisms of Tortuga whores,” the corner of Norrington’s mouth turned up, “yes, I am considering it.”  
  
“But he’s a pirate!” Gillette’s voice was the tiniest bit plaintive.  
  
Norrington sighed. That was something with which he’d been wrestling also. “Yes, the man is a pirate. But that does not immediately label him as incompetent at his craft. We would not be kept so disastrously busy out here if some pirates were not a damned sight too competent.”  
  
“You’re considering giving the _Dauntless_ to a pirate?” Governor Swann interjected in disbelief.  
  
“Temporarily,” Norrington nodded.  
  
“And what a pirate!” Groves spoke up eagerly.   
  
Norrington could recognize hero worship when he heard it, and he winced. Charming the entire Caribbean indeed.   
  
“Leaving aside his admittedly peculiar behaviour, have you noticed how that man can pilot?” enthused the Lieutenant. “I swear he knows what the sea is going to do before it does. He calls for course changes like he knows where the wind is going to be.”  
  
Actually, Norrington admitted grudgingly to himself, he had noticed. It was one of the factors in his considering this rash action even for an instant.  
  
“He talks to the _Dauntless_ like she’s a Tortuga tavern wench. Calls her Madame Behemoth if you can imagine. If she were a real woman, I swear, he’d be pinching her bottom and pecking her on the cheek,” Groves chuckled.  
  
“And tossing gold sovereigns down her cleavage, no doubt.” Gillette rolled his eyes.  
  
Norrington decided he really was going to have to go on shore leave with his men some time.   
  
“No doubt,” Groves agreed. “And she’d be giggling and cooking his favorite dishes and ignoring the rest of her customers. Have you ever seen the old lady pick up her skirts and fly like she has today?”  
  
“Gentleman,” Norrington called the meeting back to order. “I take it we are agreed that if any man can navigate this passage, Sparrow is likely that man. But even he acknowledges there are some risks attached to the attempt. Not to mention that in whatever condition we come out of this channel—if we do—we will likely find ourselves under the guns of the _Black Pearl_.”  
  
“Or she’ll find herself under our guns” was Gillette’s bloodthirsty comment.   
  
“Of course,” Norrington added. “Sparrow assures me that we are unlikely to have to meet the _Black Pearl_ in pitched battle at all. He says he has a Plan. I suppose we can believe that or not as we like. In any case it is best to be prepared for any contingency.”  
  
“Do we have any idea what Sparrow’s motives are? It seems to me that he’s being rather suspiciously helpful if you know what I mean.”   
  
Not for the first time, Norrington reflected that Gillette had the makings of a clever officer. He had a convoluted enough mind that with the right encouragement, he could develop into a first-rate tactician. Of course he was still young and a bit heedless and over-enthusiastic. But he’d grow out of that. Speaking of convoluted minds, however . . .   
  
“I haven’t managed to get a straight answer out of the man himself,” Norrington addressed Gillette’s concern. “I think he may be congenitally incapable of giving one. But something Elizabeth said has led me to believe he has a serious grudge against the captain of the _Black Pearl_ , a man named Barbossa.”  
  
“I will admit I feel more comfortable knowing he has some self-serving reason for assisting us,” Governor Swann joined in. “I do not think I could seriously contemplate an altruistic Jack Sparrow.”   
  
“I don’t think any of us can,” Gillette laughed. “Even you, Theodore.”   
  
“I am not a complete idiot, Andrew,” Groves protested. “I admire the man’s seamanship and tactics, but I don’t necessarily trust him.”  
  
“As long as the final outcome he is pursuing is concomitant with our goals, I think we can trust him,” Norrington mused. “The moment they diverge, I imagine all bets will be off.”  
  
“Let us hope that you can recognize when that moment occurs,” the governor countered with a hint of warning in his voice.  
  
“Indeed,” agreed Norrington soberly, looking down at his folded hands. “But,” he raised his eyes to each of the men around the table, “we have yet to discuss the most salient question. Granted Sparrow is the only man who may be capable of piloting us to this island. Does it therefore stand that we should allow him to do so?”  
  
“You’ll be risking a ship of over 600 souls for one man if you do,” Gillette pointed out.  
  
“I am aware of that, Andrew.” Yes, Norrington reflected, that young man had a way of cutting through to the essentials. “Nevertheless, you will agree that such risks are part of one’s duties when one serves on a Navy ship.”  
  
“We are also carrying two civilians,” added Gillette.  
  
The naval men turned to look at the governor.  
  
“Gentlemen,” Governor Swann spoke with the dignity Norrington always appreciated in the man. “I cannot pretend to enjoy the prospect of my daughter’s life and my own being placed in danger. However, I can assure you that Elizabeth would not thank me for allowing my own sentiments to prevent you from rescuing Mr. Turner.”  
  
The fact that they were all here at Elizabeth’s behest seemed to hover in the air between them.   
  
“I should point out to you,” Norrington spoke into the silence, “that Will Turner does have some intrinsic value of his own, gentlemen, apart from his importance to Miss Swann. I think you are all aware that most, if not all, of the increasingly fine work proceeding out of Master Brown’s smithy is Will’s doing.”  
  
The only person who seemed surprised at this tidbit of information was Governor Swann.  
  
“A good blacksmith is not a commodity easily come by, my friends. And a good swordsmith is worth his weight in Spanish gold,” Norrington continued. “Perhaps,” he added wryly, “we should not be so quick to condemn Jack Sparrow for needing to have a selfish reason to engage in an act of charity?”  
  
The silence now had a tint of shame to it.  
  
“May I ask what are your intentions, James?” the Governor spoke up unexpectedly.  
  
Norrington held his old friend’s eyes. This meeting of equal minds was, after all, a polite fiction. In the end, the decision would come down to him as master of this ship. He took a deep breath. “I gave my word that I would try to rescue the boy.”  
  
“Oh. Well then.” Groves pushed his chair back cheerfully. “There’s no more to be said, is there?”  
  
His men knew him too well, Norrington reflected.  
  
As if Groves had spoken for them all, the others began to rise and drift towards the door. James Norrington propped his elbows on the table and buried his head in his hands, rubbing his eyes as if to deny the whole exhausting business.  
  
Governor Swann paused beside the commodore’s chair and laid a hand on his friend’s shoulder. “Can you afford to trust Jack Sparrow with this ship?” he asked softly.  
  
“I have asked myself that same question over and over,” Norrington answered wearily, massaging his temples.  
  
“And what have you answered yourself?” The Governor’s voice was sympathetic.  
  
Norrington looked up at him. “I do not think I can afford not to.”  
  
The Governor nodded once and left the room.  
  
As the Commodore prepared to return to his duties, Gillette stopped him by the door with a hand on his arm. “I just wanted to say, sir, that it has been an honour serving with you.” He was smiling but there was an undercurrent to his light tone. “My last will and testament is in the chest by the bed in my quarters at Fort Charles. You can give my effects to my mother and sisters. But if we make it back to Port Royal alive, sir, not that I expect we will, sir. But if we do, I am going to come down with influenza for a month, sir, and leave you with all the paperwork.”  
  
Norrington clapped a hand on his Lieutenant’s shoulder. “Understood, Andrew. The honour has been mine. If we make it back alive, I will do that paperwork.”   
  
All jesting words aside, the two men met each other’s eyes soberly. There was a very real possibility Andrew was right. The Commodore felt the weight of all the lives aboard the _Dauntless_ pressing on his shoulders.   
  
TBC


	6. Night Passage

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Jack knocks a hole in Norrie’s boat, the Dauntless doesn’t quite sink, Norrington decides to kill Jack, and Groves gets to meet the best pirate he’s ever seen. Includes such tidbits as why Norrington has Jack’s compass in the deleted scene. Outrageous sailing as promised. I don't know about Jack, but I'm exhausted. Still sailing uncharted waters.

Commodore Norrington found Jack Sparrow hovering around the helm, frowning at his strange, non-functional compass.   
  
The pirate looked up at him inquiringly.  
  
“Mr. Sparrow,” Norrington said, though his jaw was so tight he could scarcely force the words out. “You say you have made this passage safely before.”  
  
“Aye, I’ve done it.” Sparrow’s voice was non-committal.   
  
Norrington got the feeling that there was something more he should be asking the pirate, but he could not imagine what it was.  
  
“Very well,” he nodded. “My officers and I have agreed to let you pilot the _Dauntless_ through to Isla de Muerta.”  
  
The brief flash of triumph in Jack’s eyes disturbed the commodore. He told himself he was perfectly aware that Sparrow had an ulterior motive. But he couldn’t shake the conviction that he was about to make a terrible mistake.  
  
“During this passage, I will allow you to give all orders pertaining to the sailing of the _Dauntless_. But I remind you that I am still the commander of this vessel and all other matters will remain in my hands. Once we have reached the island, your limited authority will be at an end. Do I make myself clear?”  
  
“Perfectly clear.” Sparrow waved nonchalantly, his eyes already leaving Norrington’s and straying to the helm of the _Dauntless_. His hand drifted towards the wheel almost with hunger.   
  
“Sparrow!” Norrington’s voice was tense. “If you put one dent in her hull, I swear I will put an equal one in your hide!”  
  
For some reason, this seemed to please the pirate. He smirked at Norrington in a way that suspiciously resembled his expression when he had held his arms around Elizabeth on the docks at Port Royal. “Don’t worry about your bonnie lass, Commodore. She and I’ll do fine together.”   
  
Norrington nodded curtly. He would not be jealous over a man’s relationship with his ship!   
  
Now it remained for him to try to explain the situation to the crew.   
  
* * * * *  
  
During the next hour, Jack Sparrow stirred up the entire crew of the _Dauntless_ to prepare for the passage to Isla de Muerta. No man would be seeing his berth this night. All watches were assigned duties ranging from manning every one of the hundreds of lines controlling the yards and sails to damage control. The pirate even had the gun crews mustered to shift the heavy cannon to the windward side of each tack should it be necessary to compensate for the heeling of the ship. Norrington shuddered at the very thought of loose cannon on his decks. Apparently the concept was equally unacceptable to Sparrow, for he found the pirate down below decks working with the gun captains to design a system of blocks and tackle that would hold the great guns from ramming through the hull of the ship while they were being transferred, no matter how she pitched.   
  
“There will be no time for orders,” Sparrow had informed the gunnery captain. “Just use your judgment.”   
  
The thought that Jack Sparrow felt this measure might be necessary gave Norrington a chill.  
  
Nevertheless, the Commodore was proud of the way his men responded to this complete upset of their routine. The pirate would never have a better crew to implement his lunatic ideas.   
  
Sparrow elected to bring the _Dauntless_ into the swift current several leagues out from the entrance to the channel. Just to get the crew used to working in its flow before it was a matter of life or death, he explained to Norrington. They would lose a little time during the maneuvers, but he expected the payoff to come in their increased chance of survival.   
  
Norrington was both reassured and increasingly disturbed. He was relieved that Jack Sparrow showed any sign of prudence—a virtue he had not much noticed in the pirate, heretofore. If Sparrow was nervous about this venture, well, a nervous captain was a man who kept his crew alive. Nothing disturbed Norrington more than a reckless captain. On the other hand, he had a feeling that things that would terrify normal men would scarcely register with Sparrow, so the idea that this passage did worry the man was not particularly comforting.   
  
Nor did he comprehend the man’s insistence on taking the helm. A captain did not perform such tasks. Sparrow’s explanation had not enlightened him at all.   
  
When questioned, the pirate had shrugged and replied, “I’ll be taking her where she knows she shouldn’t be going, so she has to trust me. And I have to feel first hand the sea and the wind against her. Besides,” Sparrow had raised an eyebrow, “ _I_ won’t be losing my nerve.”   
  
Which implied that they were going where any sane man _would_ lose his nerve.  
  
The tight tacks Jack was forcing the crew to perform when there was so much sea-room gave Norrington pause as well. The _Dauntless_ normally took eight minutes to tack and another half hour to be trimmed and secured. The commodore was used to thinking that four hours before the next tack was sufficiently short on time. Sparrow was bringing the ship about within an hour of the last tack. Was the passage really that narrow? Norrington suspected he did not want to know. He also suspected he would find out far too soon.  
  
As the _Dauntless_ raced through the night on the heels of her dark opponent, banks of fog began to obscure the moonlight and tendrils of thick mist swirled about the lanterns. The world seemed to be shrinking until the only thing left in existence was the fleeing ship, the only life the beings creeping about upon her deck.   
  
Yet, as Sparrow had promised, the wind never let up. With a banshee wail it swirled and eddied through that unnatural fog, snapping the sails taut and heeling the _Dauntless_ hard over. Her hull twisted and groaned like a living thing in torment. The head seas and battering current swept her decks like blasts of shrapnel. Her masts strained alarmingly against their stays and shrouds. Surely they must reef sails soon or her canvas would slash itself to death in the knives of the wind or her masts would wrench out of their steps. But Jack Sparrow gave no such order. And, indeed, the commodore could see that his ship was fighting stubbornly for every scrap of ground she gained, clawing her way to windward against the bludgeoning current. She needed that canvas desperately to pull the maximum speed necessary for those tacks, and somehow, that madcap Sparrow was giving it to her.   
  
Through the pitchy haze, Norrington scrutinized the strange figure at the helm of his ship. Dressed in indistinct charcoal with a flutter of white sleeve, his long, dark hair whipping and chiming in the wind, the pirate seemed like an incarnation of fog and night, himself. Sparrow had his eyes fixed on that unnatural compass, rather than on the sea, feeling rather than seeing the air humming in the sails, as he called the orders for the rapid course changes. In the weak glow of the lantern, he was an uncanny sight. Commodore Norrington felt a moment of uncharacteristic panic. He must have been mad to agree to this . . . this impossible rescue mission.   
  
“Sparrow!” He interrupted the man’s concentration, shouting to be heard over the racket of the wind in the rigging. “Let me know when is our last chance to cry off this venture!”  
  
“It’s already too late.” The pirate’s grin glittered gold and feral in the lantern light, although he did not take his eyes from the compass.   
  
So, they were now in the channel. There would be no going back.   
  
“Jack Sparrow,” the Commodore spoke through clenched teeth. “Tell me that I am not going to regret this.”  
  
“Commodore Norrington, you already do.”   
  
* * * * *  
  
Never had Norrington been through a more nightmarish passage. The sea, swathed in dense black fog, moaned with the straining hull of the _Dauntless_. The dim glow from the ship’s lanterns gave up in despair and faded to black almost immediately. In the suffocating darkness he saw imaginary cliffs loom up to devour them and did not see real ones until they were upon them. Occasionally the gaunt spar of a sunken vessel would stare up out of the water into the feeble light of a lamp, mute and threatening, and they’d hear an ominous scraping along the hull. Men’s hearts failed for fear, and he saw more than one sailor snatch a moment to cross himself and murmur a fervent prayer. They sailed, a moving island of the living, over a graveyard of dead ships.  
  
James Norrington could scarcely remember a time in his life when he had not been on ships at sea, but he had never experienced anything that felt so wrong as this headlong flight into oblivion. Gritting his teeth, he peered into the cloying blackness, straining to catch sight of obstacles, even though he knew they would be impossible to avoid by the time he did see them. Every instinct screamed that they should sail slowly and cautiously, sounding the bottom with the lead, following a clear chart with a functioning compass. That is every instinct that was not crying that they should not be here at all. But he knew they had to outrace the current he could hear groaning against the rocks in the dark.   
  
And so Jack Sparrow flung the _Dauntless_ blindly into the night, all her canvas straining, close hauled to the wind, down an invisible chasm. Her decks sloped forty-five degrees towards the frothing seas as she heeled hard to leeward, often actually dragging her rail through the waves. Beneath his feet, Norrington could hear the gunnery crews struggling to lend the weight of their charges to leveling the ship’s keel. Somehow, every time the wind shifted slightly as they passed an island or a branching channel, Jack had already given the command to trim the sails, enabling the _Dauntless_ to take full advantage of every gust of air. How the pirate knew where to direct the ship was an utter mystery. It seemed a feat not humanly possible.  
  
Judging from the look of the man, it was not an easy one. Sparrow’s knuckles were white as he gripped the helm, twin lines of concentration furrowing his brows as he called the ship about with split second timing. Sweat glistened on his face, plastered strings of dark hair to his neck, and slicked his grubby shirt to his body. But the mad grin never left. It was as if he delighted in this battle of wills with the vicious current and hammering winds.

Like Ulysses sailing between Scylla and Charybdis, the legendary Captain Jack Sparrow threaded the _Dauntless_ through the ravening rocks of the narrow passage to the Island of Death.   
  
Norrington shook himself. He had not actually thought that, had he?  
  
Yet he feared they would not get out of that dark night without meeting their own monsters in the rocks.   
  
A horrified shout from the bows of the _Dauntless_ riveted the commodore’s attention ahead. Their insane pilot was driving the ship straight into a cliff. They were all dead men! He had let Sparrow kill them all!   
  
Then suddenly they were within walls of rock. With a chill of combined relief and horror, Norrington realized that he could nearly reach out and touch the stone on either side of the vessel. The lower sails lost the wind, but with momentum and the help of the topgallants, the ship was still making way against the current. Somehow in the tarry black, Sparrow had aimed the _Dauntless_ at the only possible passage through the rocks. If they’d been one tack off, half a yard off, they’d have been scattered at the base of the cliffs like so much kindling.  
  
“I was hoping she’d fit,” Sparrow commented to him airily.   
  
Norrington resolved to murder the man the minute they were in safe waters again. A square-rigged ship was never meant to sail this close to land. She was too vulnerable to a sudden shift in wind or current crashing her onto the rocks. How dared that pirate endanger his ship and his men this way!  
  
The tight squeeze was mercifully a short one, but the instant the bowsprit cleared the narrow passage into open water again, Sparrow was shouting orders for the ship to tack violently to port.   
  
As the _Dauntless_ ’s sails filled again, Jack brought the helm hard down, calling, “Helm’s a-lee!”  
  
At his word, the men rushed to ease the jibs and the staysails, letting the air slip. Others hauled the spanker and topsail in hard to provide leverage for the weight of the wind. With the pressure off forward and increased aft, the ship began to turn.   
  
Amidst the slatting of jibs, the knocking of sheet-blocks, and the thunder of sails coming off the wind, Jack’s voice rose, “Raise tacks and sheets!”  
  
With her main lines let go and her clew lines hauling up her sails to swing free, the ship pivoted. In the dark, it was impossible to see the aft sails becalmed by the foremast sails, but Jack seemed to sense when the bowsprit came within a point and a half of the wind.  
  
“Main sail haul!” he hollered above the rattling and flogging of sails, the vibration of the masts, and the detonation of the waves against the hull.   
  
Crewmembers rushed to haul fiercely on the main and mizzen braces, bringing the sails about parallel with each other, fighting the massive tonnage of the great yards on to the port tack. The _Dauntless_ ’s bow began its swing through the wind.  
  
“No!” Commodore Norrington exclaimed. It was too soon. They’d crush her stern if they came about this early.  
  
But the _Dauntless_ ’s sails were already beginning to fill.  
  
“Now!” Sparrow roared. “Let go and haul! Brace the foreyards you dogs! Brace ’em now or I’ll keelhaul the lot of you!”  
  
In the murk of night the port watch blindly found the lines they needed and hauled fast and furiously on the foreyard braces while the starboard watch scrambled to set the mainsails. They cursed Sparrow to the deepest circles of hell, but they struggled to obey his orders, every one of them knowing in their bones how far beyond anything in their experience or even their comprehension this madness was. They had to trust him because none of their knowledge offered any hope of survival.  
  
The massive ship somehow swung free of the cliffs in an agonizing twist, now close reaching on the port tack, gaining momentum as her sails filled again. Norrington had never seen her come through the eye of the wind so swiftly.   
  
Then he realized the reason for the desperate maneuver as the _Dauntless_ shuddered and lurched, brushing up against rocks that Sparrow had known were there. In horror, he heard the terrible sound of cracking timber.  
  
“Sorry! Sorry love!” Sparrow was gasping, straining on the wheel to whip the great ship around. “Hold hard there, darling! There’s a brave bonnie lass!”   
  
He was talking to the _Dauntless_! The man was a raving lunatic! But there was no time to lock him up. And to interrupt him even to commit justifiable homicide would be to endanger their lives even more. The ship was dragging her hull along the lethal, invisible rocks, picking up speed. At any moment she could be stove in.  
  
“Damage control!” Norrington bellowed and pelted down the stairs to the nearest hatchway. Belowdecks organized chaos reigned. The cannon, he realized were being hauled to the opposite side of the deck from where water was rushing, in an effort to raise the hole above the waterline. Ship’s carpenters were dashing across the sloping planks lugging repair materials. Further below, he could hear men manning the bilge pumps. Somehow it did not surprise him when a dingy white figure caught the glow of the single lantern on her way to help patch the tear in the _Dauntless_ ’s side. Elizabeth, her arms full of material to pack the leaks, was still as ubiquitous as a cockroach, still always precisely where a man did not want her to be.   
  
“Elizabeth!” he called, hoping, with no foundation, that he could convince her to go to safety. But either she did not hear him or she was ignoring him. And now she had disappeared into the stygian darkness.   
  
His crew seemed to have the damage well in hand. Elizabeth was gone. He could see that they were in no immediate danger of sinking. Now would be a good time to go kill Sparrow.   
  
As he re-emerged on deck, he met Lieutenant Gillette.  
  
Looking at Gillette’s pale, horrified face, Norrington asked plaintively, “Remind me again. Why did I agree to this?”  
  
“Sir,” the lieutenant responded in a strained voice, “I have no idea why you agreed to this.”  
  
“I am going to kill Sparrow,” Norrington informed him with cheerful fatalism. “You can come along and watch.”  
  
“Thank you, sir.” Gillette’s reply was fervent.  
  
Bounding up the steps, the Commodore pulled up short at the sight of Sparrow, bent over the helm, stroking it as a man might a frightened horse, and murmuring to the _Dauntless_.   
  
“’S alright, love. You’ll be right as rain. Just hold it together for ol’ Jack. That’s a girl.”  
  
Norrington cleared his throat. “Sparrow, what the hell do you think you’re . . .”  
  
Straightening up, the pirate turned to face the Commodore, his eyes like burnt holes in his face.  
  
“Commodore,” Sparrow’s voice was breathless as though he had been running. “This is the final tack. It’s a straight run from here. We’ll soon be in the lee of Isla de Muerta and the current’s easing off. Take this compass.” He held out the dark box. “Do not lose it. And follow this course.” He demonstrated the direction indicator. “Do not deviate from it no matter what. Call me when we come out into a small bay.”  
  
Commodore Norrington made as though to call the helmsman.   
  
“No,” Jack Sparrow insisted. “She’ll be wantin’ her captain. And I’m not givin’ this to anyone else.”   
  
As Norrington took his ship’s wheel—not something he had done recently—he looked down at the odd object the pirate was offering in a now nerveless grip. “How does it work?”  
  
“Don’t know, mate,” Sparrow shrugged. “Just does.”  
  
Opening his mouth to object to this unscientific reply, Norrington saw the pirate sway and reach for a rail to support himself.   
  
Jack’s other hand waved at him in dismissive frustration. “Just pretend you trust me on this one, alright?”  
  
The commodore realized that Sparrow had been piloting this nerve-wracking passage for over nine hours now on top of another fourteen hours of navigating before they’d hit the channel. Perhaps the man had earned that trust. Norrington closed his mouth. He stared down at the incomprehensible compass in his hand. _Follow this course_. He imagined he could do that.  
  
* * * * *  
  
Jack made his way to the waist of the ship, his usual boneless walk a little exaggerated with fatigue. Finding an area away from any of the decreasing commotion of sailing the _Dauntless_ , he sank down and leaned his head back against her rail. “Good work, Madame Behemoth,” he told the ship. The _Dauntless_ was a true Navy ship to her core, he reflected. Gallant and tenacious and indomitable. “I wasn’t sure we were going to make it there for a minute.” He patted her deck. “Sorry about the little bump, but these Navy blokes’ll soon have you put to rights.”  
  
“Captain Sparrow?”   
  
At the sound of his title, Jack looked up startled. The only person who might have addressed him as “captain” on this ship would be Elizabeth, but that hadn’t been Elizabeth’s voice.  
  
In the faint moonlight now filtering through the scattered rags of fog, Jack could make out that the voice belonged to a young lieutenant, one who was unknown to him.  
  
“Yes, Lieutenant?”   
  
“I’ve brought you a tot of grog, sir. And a bit of salt beef,” the young man replied.  
  
“Son,” Jack said with feeling, scrambling to his feet again. “That’ll be counted to you for righteousness!” He held out his hand and felt a metal mug being handed to him. He’d been trying not to think how dry he was. The lukewarm, rum-laced liquid was coming in a close second to being the most wonderful thing he’d ever tasted. He flashed a genuine heartfelt smile at the lieutenant. “Thank you.”  
  
“You’re welcome, sir.”   
  
“What’s your name?” Jack asked as he accepted the proffered beef. Like all Navy rations it had the consistency of boot leather, but he wasn’t complaining.  
  
“Groves, Captain Sparrow,” the young man held out his hand. “Lieutenant Theodore Groves, at your service, sir.”  
  
Transferring the salt beef to the fingers also gripping the mug, Jack held out his other grimy hand to shake the lieutenant’s. “It’s a pleasure to meet you Lieutenant Groves.” He wasn’t lying. This had to be, for the record, the politest naval officer he had ever come across.  
  
“The pleasure is mine, sir,” Lieutenant Groves spoke enthusiastically. “Captain Sparrow, I just wanted to say that I have never, and I mean never, seen such an incredible job of piloting, and I very much doubt I ever shall again!”  
  
“Well now,” Jack grinned, pleased. “There was a bit of a bump . . .” he admitted modestly.  
  
“Any other man,” the lieutenant’s voice was emphatic, “would have lost the ship and all hands on a passage like that!”  
  
“P’raps any other man wouldn’t have been daft enough to attempt it,” Jack pointed out dryly around a mouthful of salt beef.  
  
“Perhaps,” Lieutenant Groves agreed with a smile. “But it was still an amazing feat. I do rather wish you were a member of the Royal Navy, sir, so that I could learn a thing or two from you.”  
  
That had to be a first. “Lad, I think the Royal Navy would likely be flogging me before the week—forget it—before the day was out.” Jack grimaced. “But I’ll tell you what. I wish you were a pirate, and then I’d be glad to be sharing what I know with you.”   
  
“When I was a bit of a lad,” Lieutenant Groves confessed, “I did think I’d like to be a pirate.”  
  
“Well there y’are. P’raps someday when you’ve had your craw stuffed full of idiotic orders and you want to shed those gold shackles,” Jack flicked a finger at the stripes on Groves' sleeve, “you might drop in to Tortuga and leave a message for Captain Jack Sparrow where you’re to be found. And next time I’m by, why, I’ll sign you aboard m’ship and there you’ll be.”  
  
“Oh, I love what I do, Captain Sparrow, so that’s probably not in the stars. But I do thank you for the offer.”  
  
The lieutenant seemed sincere, and Jack was moved to say, “”S a waste, boy. A terrible waste. But if it’s what you want . . .” He paused, having an agreeable thought. He pointed at the lieutenant. “I don’t s’pose there’s any chance of ol’ Norrington getting a promotion, as it were, and yourself taking over command of Fort Charles?” he asked hopefully. Now here was a man with whom he could work.   
  
“Not for a long time yet,” Groves laughed. “And Lieutenant Gillette, you know, the man from whom you stole the _Dauntless_ , would have seniority.”   
  
“Oh well,” Jack sighed. “I always knew Lady Fortune had it in for me.”  
  
At the sound of a shouted order, Lieutenant Groves looked up. “I believe I have to go now, sir. But it’s been an honour meeting you, Captain Sparrow.”  
  
“'S good t’meet you too, Lieutenant Groves.”   
  
Jack watched the lieutenant disappear in the direction of the quarterdeck. If that didn’t beat all. Two surprises in one day. He’d managed to fit Madame Behemoth through a needle’s eye in the dark. And he’d discovered a friendly naval officer.   
  
TBC


	7. Peas in a Pod

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which we discover why and how Elizabeth got that uniform, and distrust abounds between Jack and Elizabeth. I’ve finally made it to that deleted scene! It took me three more chapters than I thought it would.

The shift she had acquired from Barbossa, Elizabeth decided, was beyond redemption. In her mad rush to help control the water springing through the _Dauntless_ ’s riven hull, the worn fabric had begun to shred. There was most definitely a tear at thigh level that she was awkwardly holding closed. She’d heard it catch and rip as she’d scrambled over some object in the dark of the gun deck.   
  
But she had nothing else to wear.  
  
When she had first joined the governor in his stateroom, still shaken from the ordeal of her conversation with James, she’d asked her father if he’d brought any of her trunks.  
  
He had turned to her, holding out his hands, terrible memories in his eyes. “There was no time, Elizabeth. And we had no expectation . . .” he had trailed off. Pulling her into his embrace, he had explained. “ . . . It was the _Black Pearl_ , my dear child.” His voice broke a little. “. . . We had so little hope.”  
  
She shivered, not liking the reminder of that fearful time she had been in the power of Barbossa, uncomfortable imagining how the people who loved her must have felt.  
  
The important point at the moment was that there was no possible way she could acquire any appropriate change of clothing. What’s more, the _Dauntless_ would soon be anchoring in the bay of Isla de Muerta. She would be of no use whatsoever to Will in this ridiculous garb.  
  
As a young, vaguely familiar marine trotted by her, she had a sudden idea. Hurrying after him, she called in her most dulcet, “fair maiden” tones, “Oh, Mr. Burney!”  
  
The marine turned, surprised to be addressed by a young woman of fashion. He was several years her junior, really just a boy under all that scarlet splendour. Embarrassed at finding the governor’s daughter in such a ragged state of undress, Mr. Burney stared fixedly at a point somewhere beyond her left shoulder.  
  
“Yes, Miss Swann?” he managed politely enough, although his adolescent voice betrayed him with a discordant squeak.  
  
Elizabeth was reminded of Will at that endearingly awkward stage. Her heart squeezed painfully, and her resolve strengthened.  
  
“I’m so glad I found you, Mr. Burney,” she gushed, noting with fascination that his ears were turning pink. “I hardly know anyone on this boat,” she lamented with a silent apology to the Dauntless, “and I was so relieved when I recognized you!”  
  
“You did? I mean . . . your servant, Miss Swann,” the young man stammered in confusion at this unexpected acquaintance.  
  
“I am in such a quandary,” Elizabeth continued, turning the full force of her melting brown eyes on the boy. “I seem to have torn my dress irreparably!” She lifted the ruined skirt to demonstrate. “See?”  
  
Involuntarily, Mr. Burney glanced down at the rip she held clutched together in her hand.  
  
“I can’t possibly continue to wear this, can I?” she demanded, all confidentiality.  
  
Apparently, Mr. Burney had an imagination, because he blushed the colour of his coat. Snapping his eyes to the toes of his boots, he mumbled, “I don’t know what I . . . um . . . anything I can do to . . . um . . . are you sure one of the officers wouldn’t . . .?” He stumbled to a halt, looking up, trapped.  
  
“Oh, I knew you would be the right person with whom to speak,” Elizabeth rushed on blithely, ignoring whatever it was the boy had really said. “I’m sure _you’ll_ think of something to help me!”   
  
His trapped look increased at the exaggerated hero-worship in her voice. She was sure Mr. Burney wanted nothing more than to flee.  
  
“Why you might even have a spare uniform!” she exclaimed, as though the idea had just occurred to her.  
  
“Well, yes,” he admitted doubtfully.  
  
“What a wonderful idea,” Elizabeth clapped her hands joyfully. “I knew a clever man like you would think of something!”  
  
The puzzled look on Mr. Burney’s face increased. That hadn’t been his idea, had it?  
  
“We’re about the same size,” Elizabeth enthused, waving her hand at her slim, boyish figure. “What do you think?”  
  
If possible, the young man grew even more crimson. Time to seize the advantage while he was still too disconcerted to speak. Grabbing his arm, she began towing him along.   
  
“Let’s get that uniform immediately!”  
  
“Um, Miss?” Mr. Burney tugged back. “It’s the other way.”  
  
“Oh! Of course!” Elizabeth reversed directions and led her bemused captive off towards the crew quarters.  
  
A few minutes later, a relieved Mr. Burney was watching the governor’s daughter scurry off with an armful of his spare uniform, her heartfelt thanks echoing in his ears. He wasn’t at all sure he had done the right thing, but he hadn’t any idea what else he could have done.  
  
* * * * *  
  
As the doors to the governor’s stateroom swung shut behind her, Elizabeth let out her breath. Good. Her father was out. Now to don that uniform with all haste in order to present him and the commodore with a _fait accompli_ before they had a chance to object.  
  
The dilapidated shift practically disintegrated as she shed it. This new outfit had arrived not a moment too soon. Awkwardly, she put on the unfamiliar garments. The loose shirt was easy enough, although it left her bare legs startlingly exposed, but the crisp tight smallclothes were an entirely unfamiliar sensation. They clung to her legs, requiring her to tug them on. Then she spent several minutes figuring out how to fasten them. When she had succeeded, she felt only slightly less naked. Her legs were still there and visible in the thin ivory sheaths. Her father was not going to be happy at all. And the commodore . . . well, her time on the island with Jack Sparrow had given her the idea that James might be happier than he would let on . . . but he wasn’t going to like his betrothed parading about in front of his men in these revealing garments. She shrugged, dismissing their disapproval.  
  
What mattered was that now she was free to move. Elizabeth capered a few steps. Nothing interfered with her motion. She could get used to this. She pretended to fence with an imaginary opponent. Perfect. Men were so lucky. Really, it was providential that shift had torn.  
  
Now to tie the neckcloth. Too many minutes and attempts later, Elizabeth was till staring at the mirror, her brow wrinkled in concentration. She had succeeded in doing nothing but nearly strangling herself. Either the wide strip of fabric was so tight she couldn’t move her chin, or it hung on her like an absurd necklace. How did men get those crisp, neat folds and elaborate tie arrangements out of these limp, recalcitrant things? She eyed the now crinkled object with disfavour. Will didn’t wear these very often, and she was pretty sure Jack never did. Very well, neither would she. It would only get in the way.  
  
And speaking of things getting in the way, she needed to do something with her hair. Elizabeth hadn’t done her own hair often in her life, but she managed to work out the tangles with a comb and a moderate amount of Sparrow-inspired profanity. Since she had nothing with which to put up her hair, she finally decided on leaving it down, but pulling the sections near her face behind her head and braiding them together. There. That would keep her hair out of her eyes if she had to move quickly.  
  
Next, she struggled into the bright red coat. It hung out over her like drooping eaves. Apparently Mr. Burney had a set of shoulders she hadn’t noticed. Otherwise the fit wasn’t too bad. She’d never be an advertisement for a tailor, but the sleeves wouldn’t interfere with her actions and her movement would be unhampered.  
  
Dropping down on a chair, Elizabeth set about putting on the white stockings. Propping up one ankle on her knee, she was momentarily charmed by the fact that she could. No voluminous petticoats! No crushing, pinching corset to force her to sit upright and keep her arms lowered.   
  
The shoes were more of a problem. She pointed a delicately arched foot and rotated it, eyeing it dubiously. Nothing was going to make it marine-sized. Hopping up, she pawed rapidly through her father’s trunk. Stuffing a stocking into the toe of each shoe, she retried them. Now they would at least stay on.   
  
Time to brave parental wrath.  
  
As she was about to leave the room, a thought occurred to Elizabeth. Spinning about, she pounced on the forlorn heap of dress on the floor. Stepping to the large windows of the stateroom, she unlatched one and dropped the offending garment into the dark current. There. Now no one could force her back into that stupid shift.  
  
* * * * *  
  
Unfortunately parental wrath fully met her expectations. Elizabeth popped out the door onto the deck right in her father’s path.   
  
She feared perhaps he might suffer an apoplexy when he caught sight of her shocking attire. His eyes bulged and his face turned—well, puce. Elizabeth stared at him in alarm.  
  
“Father?”  
  
“Elizabeth!” her father choked. “What are you wearing?”  
  
“A uniform?” she asked, wondering if he were at all well.  
  
“I can see that,” her father sputtered angrily. “Where did you get such a thing?”  
  
“I borrowed it from one of the marines,” Elizabeth said calmly.  
  
Weatherby Swann looked ready to do violence to someone. “Which marine?” he asked through clenched teeth.  
  
Elizabeth had no desire to get poor Mr. Burney into trouble. It wasn’t his fault she’d remembered his name. “I don’t know which one,” she lied. “They all look alike in those red coats, don’t you think?”  
  
Her father took a deep breath, trying to control himself. “Why?” he asked harshly. “Why do you insist on behaving with such utter disregard for all propriety? The commodore told you he could shield you from the consequences of this fiasco with the pirates if you behaved circumspectly and avoided any more contact with that Sparrow fellow. You couldn’t be blamed for being kidnapped. But now this?” Words seemed to fail him and his wave encompassed her entire body in the form-fitting uniform. “Why?”  
  
Because she hated the chains, she wanted to say. Because propriety imprisoned her, smothered her, tied her hands, crippled her feet, silenced her voice. Because she had done nothing improper and propriety had already tried and condemned her.   
  
All she did say was, “My dress fell apart.”  
  
Her father’s mouth opened and closed again, but no sound emerged.  
  
“That would have been even more improper!” she flung over her shoulder as she strode out onto the deck.   
  
* * * * *  
  
Jack Sparrow stood by the rail staring out into the darkness as the _Dauntless_ slipped into the calm bay on the leeward side of Isla de Muerta. Commodore Norrington would be ordering the ship brought to in the location Jack had recommended.   
  
A thrill sang through Captain Jack Sparrow like the music of wind in rigging. She was out there now. He could almost feel her presence in the air, like the breath of a lover on his cheek. Only a single promontory of volcanic rock separated him from the _Black Pearl_. Only a slender strip of sea. He felt an almost overwhelming urge to vault to the rail of the _Dauntless_ and dive into the inky water.   
  
Barbossa would be feeling completely secure. He would have no reason to expect an attack. Chances were good the whole crew would be in that cavern—except for a skeleton watch. Jack smirked at the pun. Chances were also good that, if he could make it to the _Pearl_ , he could overcome those remaining men. They could not be killed, but they could be trapped or thrown off the ship. That would leave him with an uncursed crew, likely still in the _Pearl_ ’s brig. Barbossa had his own sense of honour if he coupled it with a vicious ability to find loopholes. The crew would not be harmed—yet. No doubt a loophole was in the plans, much like his own and Elizabeth’s marooning. With the crew from the _Interceptor_ , Jack could take the _Pearl_ and flee this Isle of Death. He could maroon the whole lot of the bastards as they had done to him and wait safely at sea for the curse to be lifted.   
  
Wait for the curse to be lifted—aye, there was the rub. Because the curse would be lifted when Bootstrap’s boy was dead. Jack gripped his hands behind his back as though chaining himself. He would not be making that dive for freedom.   
  
“Sorry, love,” he whispered to the night breeze. “Soon. I promise.”  
  
* * * * *  
Elizabeth caught sight of Jack Sparrow, standing alone by the rail of the _Dauntless_. She had to admit the stories hadn’t even come close to capturing the amazing seamanship of the man who could have piloted this ship through that passage. He was gazing into the night with a look in his eyes that she recognized. It was the look that had been there when he had described what the _Black Pearl_ meant to him, that look of longing for his ship. She reminded herself that she knew his priority was that bloody boat—that collection of keel and hull and sails that was his freedom. Because she had needed his help, had needed his ability to find this island and get the _Dauntless_ here, she had not betrayed his motives to the commodore. But now she wondered whether she was any closer to rescuing Will than she had been on that last little island.   
  
What was Jack up to? To what lengths was he willing to go to regain his ship? To get his vengeance on Barbossa? What and whom was he willing to sacrifice? Her slowing steps had led her past the silent pirate. She was not supposed to speak to him—propriety again—her fists clenched. But she had to know what he was thinking. How far did she dare trust him? Elizabeth moved to the ship’s rail, several yards away from Jack.   
  
Jack was aware that Elizabeth had joined him, although he did not yet look at her. Will’s bonnie lass obviously had something on her mind. She was nervously playing with the paint on the railing, drawing patterns up and down in front of her with a restless fingertip, scraping at a few loose flakes. He wondered what she was plotting. He had no doubt that she was plotting. After all, so was he. But he was not eager to have her hurling her own chaotic strategies through the carefully choreographed lines of his own plans.   
  
Turning to consider his partner and opponent in this subterfuge into which they were leading the _Dauntless_ , Jack noted with interest that Elizabeth had managed to lose the revealing and impractical shift she had been wearing for the equally revealing, shockingly improper, but much more practical uniform of a British marine. Those tight breeches left little to the imagination. He wondered how she’d ever managed to slip that little change past her father and her fiancé. Used to getting her own way was Miss Swann. A dangerous characteristic. But she certainly had a set of legs worth the showing, Jack admitted. He was not at all averse to appreciating the scenery. However, what was more interesting was what the girl’s choice of attire revealed about her designs. Obviously, Elizabeth was not planning on remaining on the ship in helpless femininity.  
  
The lass was looking out over the water, her head tilted back. Without turning to Jack, she spoke, her voice small in the immense night, “You didn’t tell them about the curse.”  
  
That was an accusation. So, Miss Swann was fishing for information as well. No doubt she was wondering if he had betrayed them all. Well that blade had two edges.  
  
“I noticed neither did you,” Jack returned wryly, “—for the same reason I imagine.”  
  
Elizabeth acknowledged the hit, bowing her head.  
  
 _That’s right, love. We’ve both betrayed Commodore Norrington and every last man on this ship._  
  
“He wouldn’t have risked it,” Elizabeth admitted. Or he would not have believed it and would have accepted nothing of what she had said as truth.  
  
Jack smiled mischievously. “Could have gotten him drunk,” he suggested.  
  
That had been an accusation, Elizabeth knew. She imagined Jack was never really going to forgive her for burning the rest of their rum while he was sleeping off the effects of consuming far too much of it.   
  
The pirate looked mockingly apologetic. “Don’t get me wrong, love.” He smiled his fallen cherubim smile—heaven and hell in equal parts. “I admire a person who’s willing to do whatever is necessary.”  
  
Yes, Jack would be a pragmatist. She had to remember that. At times it seemed so easy to trust the man. But then there were times, like now, when she could see the dangerous shoals lurking beneath his shifting, dark surface. He would do whatever was necessary for his own ends. And the universe had better step aside, because it would not be him doing the stepping.   
  
Elizabeth finally met the pirate’s gaze. “You’re a smart man Jack,” she told him, the light of battle in her eyes, an ironic smile twisting her mouth. “But I don’t entirely trust you.”   
  
Jack moved over to Elizabeth, bringing his face close to hers. He waved his hand in a gesture linking the two of them.   
  
“Peas in a pod, darling,” he told her, the irony in his voice an echo of her own.   
  
They stared into each other’s dark eyes silently, measuringly. And neither of them could say whether it was peace or war between them.   
  
Suddenly, Elizabeth caught sight of the figure of Commodore Norrington appearing out of the darkness behind Jack. Backing up a step, she turned away from the pirate guiltily. Oh, she was in deep disgrace now. She’d ignored those gently implacable suggestions and was consorting with the notorious Sparrow again in even more indecorous clothing. James was not pleased. She could tell by the crease between his brows.   
  
Sensing something was in the wind, Jack tilted around to face the commodore. So that’s what had the bonnie lass looking like she’d been caught with her fingers in the jam jar. The commodore appeared more than usually thunderous. And he’d thought they’d been getting on so well. Ah, jealousy was such an ugly emotion. Not to mention dangerous. Jack stepped away from Elizabeth with alacrity, raising his hands apologetically. _Take it easy, mate. I didn’t touch your bonnie lass. Just enjoyin’ the view is all. You might remove that stick and enjoy it yourself instead of givin’ her the megrims._  
  
Commodore Norrington tossed Jack the compass, looking like he’d rather be throwing something far harder and faster at the pirate, possibly backed by a little black powder and some fire.  
  
“With me Sparrow,” he snapped.   
  
Jack noticed he had no words for Elizabeth. Ah, trouble in Paradise, was there? He shrugged. The lass was trouble personified. The commodore might as well get used to it.  
  
He followed Norrington as the man set a brisk pace towards the _Dauntless_ ’s longboats. Time to set his plan in motion. As the commodore led him away, Jack glanced back once at Elizabeth. She was still staring after the two of them, an abstracted look on her face. The little rum-burner was a loose cannon. He’d had enough of lovestruck children whose nerve broke too soon. No more oars over the head for him. He needed to formulate a scheme to contain Elizabeth before she blew a hole in the hull of his strategy.   
  
* * * * *  
  
Elizabeth stood by the rail of the _Dauntless_ , peering into the night. Will was somewhere out in that darkness, on that cursed island. She could almost feel his presence on the soft breeze, like his breath on her face when he had almost (oh, but not quite) kissed her. She had to find a way to go to him. No bloody immortal pirates would stand in her way. No officiously solicitous fathers and commodores could prevent her. No darkly disturbing trickster pirates were going to manipulate her. She would do whatever was necessary. And the universe had best be stepping aside.  
  
“I’m coming, love,” Elizabeth whispered to the night and to the wind. “Soon. I promise.”  
  
The End


End file.
